Late December seems a natural time to reflect on the past year and plan for the one ahead.

For me, this past year was filled with quite a few major events some of which were pleasant and some of which were not.

On the business-side of things, I learned some valuable lessons.

1. Make sure that you have the right equipment and that you can really use it.

I tried working with an open source wordprocessing program but found that I needed to go to Microsoft Office after all, just for ease of transferring files to clients. I still do some stuff on the open source program because there are some things that it does better than Microsoft.

I upgraded to a Blackberry Curve from a cell phone, but I didn’t fully take into account how much adjustment the upgrade would require from me, a techno-twerp.

I encountered a couple of embarrassing situations based simply on the fact that I couldn’t fully operate the dang thing! So guess what I’ve been reading lately? That’s right, the user’s manual. Not that it has been much help. It’s all down to playing around on it and practice.

2. Charging enough and sufficiently for your time.

Big learning curve for me. I found that I’ve been totally underestimating the amount of time jobs take me. In a few cases, I’ve had to juggle stuff around or cancel other things to accommodate the schedule I’d agreed to with the client. In future, I’ll estimate the time I think a job will take me then double it.

I’ve also been charging way too little for my time. Being self-employeed means not having a regular, hourly wage. To many, this would seem obvious. I thought so too. But the real proof was in the pudding, as they say.

I felt terribly greedy about charging what other people had been suggesting. Also, I am just starting out in this biz so I felt I couldn’t charge as much as others with greater experience. The result was I didn’t charge nearly enough for my time or present skill set. My income for this year is pitiful, to say the least.

However, there is a way to make a living without pricing yourself out of the market. It just takes trial and error to find that way. Ask your coffee shop office colleagues about their consulting experiences. Review what has happened during the past year.

Then …

3. Write out your findings and conclusions.

I’m now in a process of writing a policies manual for my business. It may sound kind of silly for a one person operation, but as a local business consultant said, “It doesn’t count if it isn’t written down.” When I say manual, I really mean a couple of pages.

The upshot is: I don’t want to have to remember all this stuff all the time. By establishing standards for how my business operates, I can provide better and more consistent service to all of my clients. The manual will grow as the business grows and I acquire more experience.

The great thing is eventually I won’t have to re-invent the wheel every time. With luck, the process of providing excellent service will become easier and better for me and my clients.

It’s important to keep your remote worker mentality and portable office even though you have an office because lots of weird things can happen to keep you from that office.

In this time of H1N1, you may want to stay home away from the sickies. Or maybe you are one of the sickies and need to stay away from people. (BTW, if you are sick, just rest and get well. Don’t work!)

Serious snowfall may prevent you from getting to your office. Not all of us have taken the postal workers’ pledge: “Neither snow nor rain not heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”. As a cafe commuter, you can either stay inside your cozy home or wander down to your local coffee shop.

Perhaps your office building is experiencing anything from a brown-out to a terrorist threat, keeping a remote working kit handy will make these situations easier to deal with.

What is in a remote working kit?

Here’s what I call a basic list. Everybody will have their own variation.

Laptop, with battery cable

Laptop bag or wheelie

Extension cord

USB key with whatever programs you like to use (firefox, openoffice, etc.)

Cell phone

Cell phone charger

Pen and paper for notes

I would recommend keeping this kit accessible to you. I wouldn’t recommend leaving it in your car because of thieves; bring it with you.

Q: When have you been grateful or disappointed that you have, or didn’t have a remote working kit with you?

So now that we’ve dispensed with the supremo expensive gifts in the last post, let’s look at something a little more reasonable, shall we?

During these depressing economic times, panic is NOT the order of the day. Buy your favourite cafe commuter this set of 2 mugs with the words that strengthened so many during the dark days of WWII in Britain: Keep Calm and Carry On. Priced at $25.95 USD from Acorn Gifts — (*Note: this item is currently back ordered at time of posting.)

While hovering over your toasty-warm computer at your favourite caffeinated stop, your back may get a little chilly. Ask Santa for a lovely vest. Currently on sale at Mark’s Work Wearhouse, T-Max Vests are available in men’s and women’s sizes for $34.99 CND. (Note: Super-cute guy not included. 😦 I checked. Oh, how I checked.)

From the Canadian company, Hedonics comes a couple of really neat and useful items. Ever lose your grip on your coffee cup when you are whizzing around with your wheelie? That will never happen again, my friend, if you have

this little gadget. Called the TuGo Cup Holder, it suspends your coffee cup between the extended prongs of your wheelies’ handle. Think of it as a jolly-jumper for your liquid heart-pumper. Priced $10.99 CND

Another handy gadget from Hedonics is the HARSUN purse hanger. Keep your purse off the dirty floor and in plain view with this scientically engineered chain and hook. It comes with its own protective case. Priced $15.99 CND.

So now you don’t have to look like a Scrooge, get the cafe commuters in your life fun and useful gifts without having to hock your laptop.

Write in with the fun cafe commuter gifts you’ve either received or given.

It’s that time of year again, my friends and to help you with some creative gift-giving ideas for your cafe commuter.

From one of my favourite companies, Hammacher Schlemmer comes The Portable Handheld Scanner. It can scan any type of paper up to a maximum of 8.5 inches high by 50 inches long. For the entrepreneur or remote worker who needs to keep track of things like receipts, business cards, etc. it’s a dandy little item. Price $119.95 USD

The Portable Handheld Scanner

According to Gizmodo, the best USB to impress the heck out of your uber-geek cafe commuter is the Cosair Flash Voyager 128 GB. It’s bigger and faster than any other drive out there apparently. At $400 USD, it should be. If you really want to buy this for a special someone you can check out Amazon.com

Corsair Flash Voyager 128 GB

ThinkGeek has done it again! For the brave of heart, or simply Braveheart cafe commuter in your life, a Utilikilt is just the answer. The Utilikilt is made of a polycotton blend (strong yet soft to the touch) and has lots of pockets for storing all of your cafe commuter necessities, like a cell phone plus your portable coffee mug. This might piece of multi-pocketed splendor is priced at $139.99USD.

The Utilikilt from ThinkGeek

Since all of these gifts are insanely expensive, I suggest that you just take your cafe commuter out for coffee, crack open your laptop or smartphone and show him/her all the wonderful things you would buy them if there wasn’t a recession on.

Do you want to get an MBA-type education without spending the time and money? Here in Vancouver, BC, there is a company helping you to do just that.

Make It Business has spear-headed business reading groups around the Lower Mainland focusing on the leading business books of today.

Partnering with Blenz Coffee to provide the meeting space, Make It Business wants to facilitate not only getting people to read and discuss business books but to foster networking and mentoring opportunities for local business people.

For cafe commuters, this book club fits well with our career and lifestyles whether you are a small entrepreneur or working for a company.

Sometimes it’s difficult to find time to read those business books you’ve been meaning to read. Knowing that you are expected to read and discuss the book with a group of interesting and interested people could be that motivating factor you’ve been missing.

You can choose the group you want to be with based on your business interests or areas in which you want to be better informed (e.g. career development, business management, financial management, etc.). The Make It Business website lists a number of business books to choose from.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said:

“Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart. ”

You might also say that a good business person is a good reader.

Q: Name a business book that has influenced you the most and share with us why.

Hang onto your business cards, kids, dot tel may make them a thing of the past. It’s a new domain name which is designed to be the one-stop shop for contact info. Able to handle more information than your average business card and adapting faster than a politician in a crisis, dot tel is touted as being the phonebook for the internet.

Run by Telnic in the UK, it claims that dot tel will enable businesses and individuals to place all their information on their dot tel domain name so they don’t have to bother with a website.

Dot tel allows a user to list everywhere they are virtually or in the real world from their favourite online gaming spot to their home address and favourite coffee shop.

You can prioritize your information or use privacy filters so that you can choose who sees your information.

Remember when you change email addresses or any other contact info, you sent out a mass email to everyone telling them to edit their contact info about you? Dot tel eliminates that messy process. When you edit your information on your dot tel, it automatically updates the information to anyone who has your dot tel in their PDA or smartphone or wherever they keep your info online.

Here in Canada, the company that hosts the dot tel registry is Webnames.ca. The cost for registering a dot tel name is $19.99USD for one year.

Some communications and business gurus think that dot tel is the next big thing in the online world. What do you think?

As we Vancouverites are now just 100 days away from the 2010 Winter Olympics, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve been witnessing.

Since about March or April 2009, I’ve been hearing people talking about prepping for the huge influx of people and activity in our relatively small, sea-side city. From what I’ve heard, I have a feeling that there will be very few Vancouverites left to welcome the world when they come and very few people to tend to the needs of the world — at least in the downtown core.

Apparently, there has been a huge scramble over people booking holidays in January. I overheard a couple of Vancouver Public Library workers who were discussing the ‘challenge’ of trying to accommodate the above-average number of vacation requests for January.

The other conversation I’ve been hearing with great frequency is working from home. Remote working has suddenly become an intense topic of conversation for both workers and managers alike in Vancouver.

For those of you who don’t know the geography of Vancouver, please allow me to draw you a brief picture. It’s a beautiful city bounded on one side by the sea and by three sides by mountains. The downtown core (the financial district) is made up of relatively narrow streets with every available square inch dedicated to either skyscrapers or pay parking.

Driving into Vancouver is a nightmare at the best of times and the price to park in downtown Vancouver verges on daylight robbery. Taking transit can be fraught with frustration even if you know the buses/trains/sea bus you need to take because they run late, or break down constantly or not at all if the bus driver calls in sick. The buses and trains are generally packed beyond a safe capacity at peak commuter hours. Add in the grey rain tiddling down at a steady, depressing rate and you have a situation irritating enough to make a saint swear.

So it only makes sense to stay at home with a hot cup of tea, hovering over a nice toasty warm computer. It seems to me that a lot of companies who have offices in the downtown core or nearby will be scrambling in November and December to put remote working plans in place.

However, not everybody’s work will allow for this. A friend of mine has quite a successful counselling practice located in uptown Vancouver. She received a notice from either the building management company where her office is located or the local business association advising people to bug out during the Olympics or at least be nice to the Olympic tourists if they have to be in the downtown core to conduct business.

All this panic about being anywhere else but the office, especially an office downtown, has me thinking.

Will the Olympics serve as the catalyst to change how business is done in Vancouver? Will Vancouver be in the vanguard of business centres to make remote working the normal way to conduct business rather than just a novelty? Or will the Olympics give the Vancouver business community the boost it needs to catch up to places like San Francisco where the trend started in the first place or London, UK where remote working seems to have caught on like wildfire?